Commerce Jamming

And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of
the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’
money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves,
“Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an
house of merchandise.”

— the gospel according to John

Ever since Jesus tangled with the
moneychangers in the temple there’s been a sense that the marketplace
is a legitimate target for abuse, ridicule and subversion. (And ever since
the crucifixion, there’s been a backlash.)

One-upping Jesus was the hack of a more recent Jewish troublemaker,
Abbie Hoffman, who used the
greed of Wall Street against itself —
showering dollar bills onto the
trading-room floor and watching the brokers claw through each other to get
at the cash. Only one picture of that event has survived, and it’s
the one that’s going to be in your mind when you hear the phrase
“guerrilla theater.”

The folks who gave us gatt.org,
a parody World Trade Organization site, managed to so faithfully mimic the
modest proposals of organized capitalism that they were once mistaken for
the real thing.

The Conference on International Services in Salsburg, Austria invited a
speaker from gatt.org to make a presentation at their Session on
International Trade in 2000. The offer was accepted and
hilarious hijinks ensued.

The same group, or a similar one anyway, was mistakenly invited to send a
speaker to an international textiles conference. They sent
Hank Hardy Unruh.
“Hank argued
that the U.S. Civil War (after which
slavery became illegal) was a useless waste of time and resources, because
slavery (imported labor) would have eventually been replaced by the much
cheaper system of remote labor — like we have in sweatshops
today.”

A group calling itself Whirl-Mart
infests the halls of commerce with site-appropriate dance:

The ritual consists of interested humans arriving at a predetermined
Wal-Mart at 12 noon on the first Sunday of every month and proceeding to
push empty shopping carts slowly and silently through the aisles.
Eventually, all of the participants locate one another and form a
single-file chain of anti-shoppers which weaves, wanders, and whirls
throughout the different departments of the store for about an hour.
Overall, it is a soothing and fun experience for the actors, and perhaps a
memorable spectacle for shoppers. It is a collective reclamation of space
that is otherwise only used for buying and selling. It is a symbolic
display of the will to resist the capitalist ideology. And, it is a
living, breathing, moving, evolving sculpture.

Paul Tourtelle and a number of “fungagement” activists held a party at Ikea stores in both Amsterdam and Paris. In the
living rooms that Ikea provides to show off its products, “we
introduced our own decorations, snacks, booze, music and dozens of guests
(some of whom came dressed up). The party in Amsterdam continued for an
hour, as staff thought it wise to not interfere with us much. In Paris one
person was arrested for marihuana use and another for filming the
event.”

His site includes scripts that you can use to organize your own actions,
such as “Cellphone Opera #1:”

You can use lots of people for this one, and the more the
better… each of you is talking on your cellphone. And, each
of you has thoroughly researched an issue about this company
[Starbucks].
One of you knows about mono-culture coffee farms drenched with pecticides,
another knows all about the Fair Trade coffee they hide on the back shelf,
another talks about their union-busting, another about booting out longtime
local businesses, another about the StarbucksPres. Making 2 million last year,
etc. You can get this info at
Global Exchange and Organicconumsers.org

So all ten go into one café at once. Each of you is talking to a
wife or a husband or a close friend. In other words, the call is charged
emotionally. And, each of you ten people cannot persuade yourself to
get the latte-to-go that the person you’re talking to on the cellphone
wanted. You were supposed to be running this errand but you are having
such a fit of disapproval about this company that you, right there, are
deciding to not do it. But the person you are talking to is arguing with
you. You raise your voice…

The sniggle artist Banksy shopdropped
500 Paris Hilton CDs
in record stores in Britain that “contain Banksy’s remixes and
have titles like ‘Why am I Famous?,’ ‘What Have I
Done?’ and ‘What Am I For?’”

A web site called
re-code.com
gives you the tools to print out your own bar-code label stickers with
information of your choice — so when you reach the checkout counter,
you pay the prices you’ve programmed in. Oooh!
That’s dirty pool.

A parody group calling itself the
Organization of Corporations Against Coöperation
staged a protest against small business and in favor of
giant corporations. They picketed a small bookshop with signs saying things
like “Size Does Matter” and urged passers-by to patronize
instead huge chain bookstores.

The same group later managed to get a branch of one such giant bookstore
chain to close for one day — they masqueraded as a pro-corporate
taskforce who was monitoring local anti-corporate activity and said that a
planned protest might get out-of-hand, recommending that the bookstore
close up shop for the day of the protest.

Rob of Cockeyed.com plans to unleash
an army of cloned
“Safeway Club” cards on the supermarket’s databases.
He’s created sheets of duplicate
UPC bar-code stickers that
people everywhere can affix to their cards so that they all appear to be
the same shopper.

The Yes Men put together a creepily-verisimilitudinal public education
site for Dow Chemical corporation:

Acceptable Risk™
is a voluntary initiative of Dow to safely predict the precise point at
which profitability is threatened by danger to the public. Using our new
Acceptable Risk Calculator™ (ARC), we weigh profits against costs in
human life or health, thereby involving the public in the decision-making
process about whom to put at risk, and where to locate risk globally.

Leigh Beadon has developed a set of games
to play at the “Gap” clothing store. There’s something
good to see in this idea of converting a forum for consumption into one for
recreation.

In 1992, Spy magazine investigated the public relations
industry by creating a fake company that wanted to get big selling
Bunny Burgers.
“All nine of the PR firms we
contacted expressed an interest in meeting with us as soon as
possible.”

“Wherever printers are sold, you find them: crisp colorful printouts
showing the whole palette of a printer’s ability,” report the
folks at cockeyed.com.
They decided to print up some of their own and place them all official-like
at CompUSA, Best Buy and Radio Shack.

Even funnier, they scanned in a helpful guide about how to put a lid on your
coffee cup without getting burned from a “Java City”
café and made slight modifications
to the text: “Begin by placing your hot cup of coffee on a firm, hard
surface. Run your fingers slowly around the rim, checking for unusual
bumps or swelling,” the instructions begin. The pranksters then
laminated their modified versions and substituted them for the originals in
various “Java City” locations, where they stayed up for several
months.

Do you ever get those things in the mail that look like checks but turn out
to be just advertisements? A fellow named Patrick Combs took one down to
the bank and deposited it — it resembled a check so much (and may
have met the legal requirements for a binding contract of debt) that the
bank accepted it. U.S. $95,000 later,
someone figured out that something was fishy, but by that time, Combs had
gotten a cashier’s check written out and placed in a safe deposit
box! Go to his web page to get the details of his adventures.

Taking a cue from the “open source” software movement, the
folks at OpenCola have opened the source code
(the recipe) for cola — so now anyone can make the stuff without
having to subsidize Coke & Pepsi’s advertising campaigns.

Advertisements lie and they don’t even try to be coy
about it. The rules about what lies you can tell without being hauled into
court for fraud are written to be generous to the liars (when you see who
wrote the rules, it’s no big surprise).

Kudos to The Barbie Liberation
Organization — they switched the voice chips in Barbie and
G.I. Joe dolls and returned them to toy stores in altered form
to strike a blow against stereotyped gender roles.

I don’t know what the makers of
Invisible Jim
are striking a blow against.

Jonah Peretti has an interesting collection of email exchanged with
the Nike shoe people, in which they explain why they’d be unable to
grant his wish for personalized “NIKE iD” shoes emblazoned with
the word “sweatshop.”

Raphael Gray understands how insecure and vulnerable on-line commercial
transactions are, especially those mediated by notoriously sloppy Microsoft
products. And he couldn’t understand why nobody else seemed to think
it was a big deal. So he decided to dramatize his case.

Over one month in 2000,
Gray cracked thousands of insecure e-commerce sites, and then posted the
numbers and expiration dates of some 23,000 credit cards on the web.

He even picked up Bill Gates’s credit card number, and used it to
order a case of Viagra for the big guy.

Adbusters has been promoting an annual
“Buy Nothing Day” as a way to make a stand
against consumerism. However, this “perfect feel-good, liberal,
middle-class activist non-happening” doesn’t impress one group:

“A day when the more money you make, the more influence you have
(like every other day). A day which, by definition, is insulting to the
millions of people worldwide who are too poor or marginalized to be
considered ‘consumers’…. Well, this year, while the
Adbusters cult enjoys yet another Buy Nothing Day, accompanied
by their fancy posters, stickers, TV and radio advertisements and slick
webpages, a few self-described anarcho-situationists from Montreal’s
East End are inaugurating Steal Something Day.”

Cacophonists have infiltrated and mocked some of the most beloved idols of
the consumer culture, for instance
Chuck-E-Cheese.

In one such prank, the Los Angeles Cacophony Society
snuck into a Toys‘R’Us and put a selection of labeled, bar-coded,
cement-filled teddy bears on the shelves,
then stuck around to witness the resulting mayhem.

Here’s one way of making a stand against waste: A group of
“fungagement” activists in The Netherlands noticed that people
in Amsterdam were always throwing away perfectly good things. In November
1999 the group, calling itself the Institute for Economic Disruption,
collected 207 such worthy waste products. Then, they removed price tags
from comparable products at the Bijenkorf, a luxury department store,
attached the tags to the objects from the garbage, and placed their
products up on the shelves to be sold as new.

Some clever musicians-rights advocates are battling
MP3-based piracy by spiking on-line
distributed music databases with MP3
files they call “cuckoo’s eggs” that are named as though
they were reproductions of copyrighted songs but which actually contain
other sounds.

When a telemarketer calls,
it’s only humane to try to transmogrify the encounter into something
just a little more fun. Then again, there’s something to be said for
simple revenge.

And, speaking of rude panhandling, no
billboard should escape
being forced to uncover its ugliness or ours.
(However, some
billboards seem to need no help…)

A junkmail-sick fellah named Charlie writes: “I have it (on fairly
good authority) that the best (worst) thing you can do to a junk mailer is
send back those postage paid envelopes with
an
oz. or so of the ‘sparkles’
you can get in most craft shops. They are stick tenaciously to
everything, including the scan heads of the mail sorters, and jam
up the works. Word has it that it takes about ½ hour to clean up
after this happens.”

When “spam king” Alan Ralsky was profiled in a press account,
spam victims took advantage of his indiscreet hubris. They uncovered his
street address and signed him up for every junkmail list they could find.
This was so successful that the vengeance-minded are starting to develop
automated denial-of-service-like attacks using the U.S. post office.

A bunch of angry Canadians going by the name
“L’Anti-Noël Avant le Temps”
sent letters to Montreal shopkeepers warning them to take down their
too-early Christmas decorations and leave them down until at least December
first, or face the consequences, which included vandalism and further
“well written, poetic” threats.

Creative use of email chain-letters is showing a great deal of promise
— one promised that for each pair of used tennis shoes that you send
in to Nike,
they’ll send you back a brand new pair. Last I heard, Nike had 500
boxes of old shoes that they didn’t particularly want.

Someone else sent out email to 25,000 customers of the Safeway grocery
store chain, appearing to be email from Safeway, warning
the recipients of huge price increases, and suggesting that they
shop elsewhere.

A particularly wicked hack was Luther Blissett’s parody of the
archetype of poisonous product tampering — instead of putting rat
poison in children’s candy, he bought packages of rat poison,
replaced the poison with candy, sealed up the packages and put them back on
the shelf.

What do you do when some scam artist tries to trick you into sending
’em the powerbook computer you’re auctioning off on eBay in
return for some improbably large amount of money being held by a phony
escrow service? Well, if you’re foolish or inexperienced, you fall
for it. If you weren’t born yesterday, you ignore it or report it to
eBay’s enforcement arm.

If you’re Jeff Harris, you enlist a crack team of internet sleuths to
track the scammer back to his den, and then you ship him a fake
p-p-p-powerbook made out of some keys from a broken
keyboard pasted to the inside of a white three-ring binder — and make
him pay the postage and customs charges!

The workplace, degrading and soul-suffocating as it so often is, has
become a favorite place for
sabotage
Entertaining tales are common of employees who get even with worthless
supervisors, or who play pranks just to disrupt the tedium.

If you’re thinking of getting involved in commerce jamming, you should
check out the folks at
®TMark.
They are sponsoring a number
of interesting commerce jamming projects, and even claim to provide funding
for creative hacks and creative career counselling for employees whose
pranks have gotten them fired.